Red Cross rushes to build housing for displaced Haitians as hurricane season nears

CITE SOLEIL, Haiti — The sky over the Caribbean turns from blue to gray and then nearly black. The wind picks up and it lashes out with pelting rain. At the edge of a camp jammed with ramshackle tents, the pace of hammering grows faster.

"They are coming," says Jacky Saintil, staring into the sky. "There is not much time, the men will have to work faster."

Saintil works for the Haitian Red Cross and the "they" are the inevitable storms that will soon strike. If the hurricane season is as bad as predicted, the misery of a million people living in tents will worsen as their shelter blows away and the ground beneath them turns to ooze.

Around him, men in construction helmets build transitional housing. In just a few days, they have nearly finished 10. Simple houses to be sure, one room, 16 by 12, with corrugated zinc roofs, wood frames, and floors and walls of plywood — mansions compared to the shelter for most people in this field at the edge of Haiti’s worst slum.

Pascal Panosetti, a Swiss architect who works for the International Red Cross, says the houses will resist hurricane winds and won’t collapse if an earthquake comes.

"They could last 10 to 15 years," says Panosetti, who designed them.

He says he is happy about the pace of construction. Just a week ago, only the holes for the wooden beams had been dug and cement poured. Now some houses are almost ready. The Red Cross has trained and pays the workers.

But it is a measure of the frustrations of providing shelter to displaced Haitians that the construction of a few temporary wooden shelters is cause for celebration. After all, it is more than six months since the Jan. 12 earthquake.

Julie Sell, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross, offers another ironic cause for celebration. This field represents the first instance of the willingness of the Haitian government to allow transitional housing to be built on public land.

"Months of negotiations," she says. "But we finally were able to start."

Available land, she says, is the biggest obstacle to building transitional housing. Neither private nor public landowners want it on their land. Much worse, ownership to land is disputed and records were destroyed—not far from here lie the ruins of town hall, one of the many public buildings that collapsed in the earthquake.

"We have the materials, we have the money, we have the plans," says Sell. "If we had the land, we could get it done."

The Red Cross and other large non-governmental groups agreed to build 150,000 of these temporary shelters—enough to take more than half of the people out of tents. Each costs $2,400 to build and takes five to seven days to erect.

They are built on a foundation made from the rubble created by the earthquake.

But where to build them? Most homes destroyed by the earthquake remain piles of rubble—some 25 million cubic yards of broken concrete—and that land is unusable. Sell likes to offer this statistic:

"It would take 1,000 heavy trucks working every day for three to five years just to clear the rubble," she says. But 1,000 such trucks do not even exist in Haiti.

Local politicians realize the value of shelter. Panosetti says talks over this field frequently broke down because local leaders demanded the right to select who would live in the new homes.

"We told them that was not possible," Panosetti says. "The people must decide."

And they will decide, according to Saintil, on the basis of need. The injured and handicapped get first priority, followed by families with large numbers of children. Then the unemployed.

"We have a local committee and its members set the rules," he says.

The Red Cross had hoped to build more than 1,000 of the homes here, but the local politicians controlling the property limited it to 250. That was not entirely unreasonable—the larger transitional homes are displacing the shacks. Families have been evicted so others might have better homes.

"We know it’s a Band-Aid," says Sell. "This is a Band-Aid nation."

Saintil tries to offer some comfort to the twice displaced who must move again.

"We will give them tools so maybe they can build their own homes," he says. "And we will give them better tarpaulins."